Rosemary Dinnage

In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century’s dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison’s haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven ‘mad-doctors’ described here.

Reading the passionate letters of Janácek and Pirandello, two elderly men writing to two much younger women, one is led to wonder whether relationships quite like this would be possible today – even assuming the telephone did not exist and letters were still written. The Twenties were not so extremely long ago, not a period of fans and fainting fits and cabriolets. But we are accustomed now to think of inconsolable yearning at least as a more feminine than masculine habit, and a rather neurotic and undesirable one at that. If an eminent sixtyish man today fell hopelessly for a girl forty years younger, would he reveal it in letters? Would she herself be flattered, embarrassed, brisk, amused? We shan’t, in the telephone age, have the chance to find out in any case; letters like those in the books reviewed here must be, along with Kafka’s to Felice Bauer, some of the last to document how it is to live for and feed off the image of an absent person.’

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept in her New York apartment in the 1870s a stuffed baboon with a copy of The Origin of Species under its arm, along with a platonically infatuated colonel, a golden Buddha, and piles of esoteric books. The baboon represented the science and materialism which were creeping up on the late l9th century and which Blavatsky and many others felt to be threatening and arid. At the end of his survey of a century of cults and gurus, of sincerity and fraudulence, of hopes and disappointments, Peter Washington detects the faint sound of Blavatsky’s baboon having the last laugh.

The sharpest comment in Freud’s Women – a huge book, but consistently readable – comes at the end. It would be eccentric, say the authors, to conclude after five hundred-odd pages that Freud’s significance for women lies in his having been the first equal-opportunities employer. Eccentric, but rather tempting because, in his famously ambivalent way, he left such a paradox behind. Grossly demeaning, even by the standards of his time, in his various theories about women, he maintained relationships with them as fellow-analysts and friends which were much more cordial and straightforward than his relationships with male colleagues. And over the years 1920 to 1980, when the figures for women in medicine and law were 4-7 per cent and 1-5 per cent respectively, that for women analysts was 27 per cent. Yet ‘What does Woman want?’ he fatuously asked. A woman wants a bit of sense. What on earth did Freud want?’

Love: popular music, schmaltzy tunes, have always told us this was what Paris was for. But ‘en France maintenant, les intellectuels ne baisent pas,’ says Lucienne. She has four children by her French professor husband, nevertheless, and one by her English lover, and leads a busy commuting life. Husband and lover are friends and child care is shared. Is this the new pattern of life for the once so bourgeoise Parisienne who spent her time boiling up bones for stock and squeezing fruit in the market? ‘I’ll suggest it to my husband, but I don’t think he’d be keen,’ says my train acquaintance Josette; nevertheless, she is radiantly travelling back from a solo package weekend in Venice, leaving three teenagers with her husband. Liberation of varying degrees is under way among Parisian women. But it seems there is a Sloane Ranger stratum as well. The Figaro carries a piece about jeunes filles. At a ball they wear white tulle from couture houses to dance with uniformed boys from the Polytechnique. Bridge lessons, single-string pearls, Maman’s cocktail parties, engraved invitations, an engagement ring by 20 at all costs. The difference now, says the writer, is that the plain ones are not content to retire with their embroidery: they go in there and fight and win.